Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Debugging Wireless LAN has always been a rather difficult item. And it was even more difficult on Windows, because you didn’t see many things that other operating systems showed you at point blank range.

But Microsoft has a commandline tool available that many people do not know about, but might make your life a lot easier if you do.

netsh wlan show networks mode="bssid" interface="Drahtlosnetzwerkverbindung"

You’ll have to replace “Drahtlosnetzwerkverbindung” with the name of your wireless adapter. Here’s a snippet of example output:

SSID 1 : dataline
Netzwerktyp : Infrastruktur
Authentifizierung : WPA-Enterprise
Verschlüsselung : TKIP
BSSID 1 : 00:19:07:90:91:00
Signal : 100%
Funktyp : 802.11a
Kanal : 116
Basisraten (MBit/s) : 6 12 24
Andere Raten (MBit/s) : 9 18 36 48 54

Nice and detailled, isn’t it? Much better than the GUI. I would strongly recommend any Windows admin to read up on netsh. It offers many possibilities and debugging option, yet this tool isn’t as well understood as it should be.